Ancestors as Runners
Were our ancestors sprinters or marathoners?
Dr. Arthur De Vanny has written:
The Masaii are a beautiful, tall and linear people. They are pastoralists who live by keeping cattle whom they bleed for nutrition. They mix some kind of anti-coagulant in the blood lest they choke to death when it coagulates in the throat, as Jack LaLanne nearly did. They move by WALKING at a very high pace, unless they are on the lion hunt. The lion hunt is a ritual of manhood and also deters predation on their cattle. I used to have a Masai spear.
But, it is wrong to portray their running, if that was the intent, as the kind of running marathoners or even joggers do. Their runs are of the same sort the lion does. Usually, it is a male lion they are hunting because they prize the mane and the large trophy. A male lion is huge and capable of great sprinting speed. But, it has little endurance. So, the run these hunters made would be of a burst-rest kind, just the kind of running Evolutionary Fitness recommends. A four hour hunt would have been a series of sprints by the lion with a chase and then a stealthy tracking to find the animal who would then sprint off again. The massive musculature of the lion would have required this pattern of running. It would be incapable of prolonged running, save at a trot. So, I agree this is a natural pattern. But it is nothing like a long jog or marathon...
The powerful indian who kills the buffalo does so by sprinting, not jogging. And he has the power to kill a powerful beast with a strong thrust. Then he has to do the hard work of butchering and carrying the  kill back to camp. I recall a story of 5 indian males who ran buffalo of a cliff into a pit and then jumped into the pit to kill them. Then they hauled these 2000 pound beasts out of a 10 foot deep pit. Running a deer or horse down is a common tale you hear and it was done over a long period of sprints and slower trecking, keeping the animal from water so that it dehydrated and dropped with exhaustion...
I do appreciate these stories as they point to the magnificence of ancestral humans. They could play in the NFL easily with their power, speed, and endurance. Ancient humans of the last 100,000 years were much larger than moderns with the present generation Americans only now reaching a similar stature. They could see the moons of Jupiter without a telescope, bite a nail in half with their powerful teeth and jaws. They had no traces of modern diseases such as heart disease, poor teeth, oesteoporosis, or lesions on their skeletons that showed infectious disease such as tuberculosis or anemia.
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